The Legend of Grimrock Website has a launch week update, saying the dungeon crawler can still be had for its 10% preorder discount, and also outlining plans for the game's first patch, to address the following issues:

jimnms wrote on Apr 14, 2012, 17:39:This has nothing to do with games being dumbed down. In this case the game has made something more complicated than the old school games it's modeled after.

It's modeled after Dungeon Master which did it like this, almost precisely (i'll come back to that).

jimnms wrote on Apr 14, 2012, 17:39:I don't know how Dungeon Master did it

There, go revise your classics before complaining And prepare a pen & paper.I remember noting down all the spells of Dungeon Master (and then Chaos Strikes Back), along with the hand graphed maps.

As for the spell system in Grimrock, my only complaint is the runes mask the character selection (and its hands) and that i cant give him an item when the runes window is open.Also in Dungeon Master the rune system had a certain logic to it, and more importantly the 1st rune was the power rune: you decided which power to apply to your spell with that one. Runes also had a translation, which made memorizing spells a lot easier (FUL IR = fireball, i can remember that 25 years later..). This was my favorite spell system, over the D&D style that EoB used...